Spring Bark 2022 – Dogs on Vacation

Spring Bark 2022, y’all! This won’t be as dramatic as whatever’s going on in Panama City Beach or Cancun, Mexico this week, but I mean look at these cute faces and how could you not want to party with these pups?

Thanks for dropping in…

-Out of the Wilderness

Uber Eats Starbucks Ad – The Music and More!

Uber Eats and Starbucks have joined forces in a new ad featuring music that might make you just as happy as a vanilla bean frappe delivered to your door. Here’s the commercial…

The Music. Serving as the soundtrack for this ad is a song called “Obxessed” by Fire Choir. Here’s the full track…

For more about the Nashville-based band, check out FireChoir.com You can also follow them on Instagram @FireChoirTheBand.

This is not the first ad the two powerful brands share together. Here is another one from a couple years back.

Thanks for stopping by!

-Out of the Wilderness

Conditioned response to gas prices

Everyone and their mother knows gas prices are one of the hot topics on news shows and in barber shops. It’s an easy conversation to start because I’d conservatively say 90% of driving Americans are not cool with the prices rising by the dimes and quarters every day.

I remember very recently I bypassed Sam’s Club gas because there was a line I didn’t want to wait in. The price was $3.22/gallon. I thought I’d just wait it out a few days in case the cost went down. I was wrong. A little over a week later, $4.15/gallon. Yikes!

It became common for gas prices in the afternoon to have raised from what they were that same morning. Ludicrous, I tell you! But then…

…like seeing a double rainbow, watching a butterfly break out of a cocoon, or two ice skaters completing the Pamchenko twist, it happened. One day last week gas stations all across north Florida kept the afternoon prices the same as they were in the morning. Honestly, I felt like this:

Sad, isn’t it? Such a conditioned response that either big tech (or big government?) has us in the habit of. It’s crazy to realize that gas prices (and this isn’t necessarily limited to gas) go up nickels and dimes and quarters at a time in just a few days but they go down a few pennies a month. Something’s off about that and I don’t think electric vehicles are the solution. Here’s why: as soon as the government realizes we’re all saving a bunch of money (not just by switching to GEICO, mind you!), they’ll fiddle with the price of electricity.

Has me thinking we might as well return to horseback!

I’m trying not to be cynical about it all, and truly life is pretty grand when we don’t let other people determine our happiness and joy, but show me a politician who’s NOT in it for power, money, and prestige, and you’ll have my attention.

-Out of the Wilderness

A year ago today

Hi there! If you’re new to the site, I post every day at 1pm central. It started as something to challenge myself with in 2020. Now, I feel weird imaging how I’d go through a day without posting something. In fact, I’ve posted something daily through 2020, 2021, and plan to do it for the rest of 2022, as well. So click around, there’s bound to be something you enjoy reading. Thanks for dropping in! And now, on to today’s post. I am kind of reflecting on what I was doing a year ago, this very day, and how much has changed in my life since then…

It’s hard for me to believe that just 365 days ago, this very day in 2021 I was writing about bad band names without any inkling of an idea that later in the year I’d be selling my house, selling my car, and calling Florida home. A bit of my backstory is that I’d lived in Nashville, Tennessee for 16 years and while I thought that one day I’d want to live in Florida again to be closer to family, I didn’t have any plans to go there anytime soon.

Going back 2 years (March 2020), I had just posted a clever (if I do say so myself!) post about everything going on with the pandemic which was really just beginning to take over all parts of our lives here in the US.

Now it’s two years later and there’s a lot less fear about the coronavirus. Unfortunately, it’s still around. Much less back then did I think that in 2 years I’d be living in a travel trailer on my family’s property. It’s pretty crazy how fast things can change. In fact, the decision I made about selling my house to live closer to family happened so quickly, too.

I had been to lunch with a couple of former co-workers. One had become a real estate agent and we joked that our little lunch hang out was his way of tricking us into his realtor pitch. It was just a few weeks later I called him and said, “I’m not doing this, but if I WERE to list my house for sale, what kinds of things should I start working on at the house?” The truth is I WAS doing that. I flipped from not leaving Nashville anytime soon to boom, let’s get this thing on the market. He and I listed it just a few weeks later and it sold 2 days after that.

A whole lot has happened since the day I walked out of that house for the last time. I’ve been able to spend time with family in ways I couldn’t have if I was still in Tennessee, so for that reason alone, the ups and downs of such a big lifestyle and location change have all been worth it.

So did I think I’d be living in Florida on March 14th, 2022? Heck no. But it’s true and I’m pretty pumped about it, and excited about what’s to come.

-Out of the Wilderness